Quilts & Heritage

For some reason, when I started doing posts about crafting and charity, I thought I might run out quickly. Ha! Crafters are one of the more charitable groups of people I’ve ever seen, there’s always someone wanting to get involved and use his/her skills for someone else. Knitting/crocheting and quilting alone gives me an endless supply of possibilities, not to mention the folks who sell their goods for charity.

My recent rediscovery of my Amish-inspired quilts prompted me to take a look at heritage quilts and heritage projects about quilts. Quilts are a very versatile medium, capable of depicting almost anything in fabric and thread (and other mediums, too). They are also a very practical medium. Everybody needs a blanket, so in tough times when other sorts of means of expression were out of the question due to resource and time constraints, quilts were often the method by which people’s creativity shined through. Quilts were a way to make something beautiful, to tell women’s stories, to record and commemorate important events like weddings, to bring together varied groups for social interaction, and of course to use up scraps that couldn’t be wasted to boot.

As a once-frontier nation, American has a huge quilt history. In fact, quilting was really quite altered when it traveled here, and became something it hadn’t been before.

I’ve discovered there are some organizations dedicated to preserving the history of quilting. There are a lot of resources available through these organizations for learning about quilting.  Today I’m highlighting the national Alliance for American Quilts.  This is a treasure trove of information about quilts and quilters.  The Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving quilt heritage.  They run a variety of efforts designed to foster knowledge and preserve history.  The operate in partnership with others, including museums, educational institutions and local quilt organizations.

The Alliance has A LOT of projects going, and has partnered with a number of organizations to bring this effort to life.  I’m impressed at the variety of efforts and the real effort toward preservation and information outreach.

1. The Center for The Quilt Online is the Alliance’s home for outreach and education.
2. Quilters’ S.O.S. - Save Our Stories is a project to get and save the stories of contemporary quilters.  Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Center for American Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware.
3. Quilt Treasures: is an oral history project about 1960s and 1970s quilters. Operated with the Center For The Quilt at the Michigan State University Museum and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
4. Boxes Under the Bed™: is an archival effort targeting quilt ephemera - patterns, letters, and other related items.  Pending partnership with the Center for American History, University of Texas.
5. The Quilt Index is the educational effort of the Alliance, and operates alongside MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine and the MSU Museum based at Michigan State University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Illinois State Museum, the University of Louisville Archives and Records Center, the Tennessee State Library, the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc., and Quilts of Tennessee are all Index partners.
6. H-Quilts is the forum of the Alliance for sharing information about the Alliance’s ongoing work.  This effort is conducted with the American Quilt Study Group and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts and Letters OnLine.

A Little More Progress

Jeff and I hate cleaning. Although we’d much prefer to pay someone else to do it, this is not possible, so we instead have turned to this thing called Chore Wars. This is an online … well, it’s sort of a game, it was modeled after online games, but in this case your “adventures” are your chores and cleaning projects. You gain various types of experience points and gold coins for completing your chores. You have the option to add “demons” to the chores you put in, and also rewards.

So far it’s working pretty well around here, particiularly the possibility of rewards. This below is my character badge recently - I earned a cookie! I was last seen Mucking the Stables (my euphemism for cleaning a cat box).

In other news: I usually divide up my crafting by working on my long-term crochet projects during the week at night, and do other sorts of things on the weekends - sewing, etc. Sometimes, the little-bit-at-a-time crocheting gets frustrating because it feels like I’m not making ANY progress and that it’s going to last FOREVER. It doesn’t help that I seem to like making blankets.

So I made myself a graph, which made me feel much better. See the orange? That’s what I’ve already done, which is most of it. I also already made a black border for each of those 48 squares. The blue is what I have to accomplish still - 3 seams and 2 rows of crochet on the outside - since I’ve decided to add a yellow border inside the black outer one.

And now, the weekend, in which I retreat to my sewing machine, bake a cake & some muffins, paint some stuff and play with Mod Podge.

Bean Bag Improvement

This is the Nook by designer Philippe Malouin (via Design Milk).  It is a crocheted chair - sort of crocheted using his hand/arm instead of a hook.  It reminds me of a bean bag.  It can be uncrocheted, I understand, and redone in different ways.  The crocheting is done by hand, and the “yarn” is stuffed cotton tubing.  You can go to his page, linked above, and see him make it.